Laura D'Andrea Tyson

Being considered for: A top economic post.

Would bring to the job: Experience in the Clinton administration, where she was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, the first woman to hold the post, and then director of the economic council. Before coming to Washington in 1993, she was an academic economist with an expertise in trade policy, international competitiveness and high technology.

Is linked to Mr. Obama by: A late-in-the-campaign conversion to his cause, having supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton until she dropped out of the presidential race. Ms. Tyson quickly became a vigorous, vocal supporter of Mr. Obama, speaking out in television interviews and joining a small team that advised him on economic issues, often via conference calls as he crisscrossed the country.

In her own words: The economic expansion in the Bush years “has been marked by the fact that employment growth has been extremely weak. It’s marked by the fact that this is the first economic expansion on record — on record — where the family incomes of working families have declined in real terms.” (In an interview on Fox News’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.”)

Used to work as: A professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an expert in trade and international competitiveness and director of research for the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, she was dean of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, from 1998 to 2001, and then served four years as dean of the London School of Business, where she founded the school’s Center for Women in Business.

Carries as baggage: Surprisingly little. She came through four years of the Clinton administration without becoming the target of great public criticism or praise.

Biography includes: Born June 28, 1947, in New Jersey. ... graduated from Smith College summa cum laude and earned her Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. ... taught economics at Princeton for three years, then shifted to Berkeley in 1977, where she is now a professor at the Haas School of Business. ... married to the writer Erik Tarloff. ...they have one son.